Astropy provides a common framework, core package of code, and affiliated packages for astronomy in Python. Development is actively ongoing, with major packages such as PyFITS, PyWCS, vo, and asciitable already merged in. Astropy is intended to contain much of the core functionality and some common tools needed for performing astronomy and astrophysics with Python.

Halotools builds and tests models of the galaxy-halo connection and analyzes catalogs of dark matter halos. The core functions of the package include fast generation of synthetic galaxy populations using HODs, abundance matching, and related methods; efficient algorithms for calculating galaxy clustering, lensing, z-space distortions, and other astronomical statistics; a modular, object-oriented framework for designing galaxy evolution models; and end-to-end support for reducing halo catalogs and caching them as hdf5 files.

Photutils provides tools for detecting and performing photometry of astronomical sources. It can estimate the background and background rms in astronomical images, detect sources in astronomical images, estimate morphological parameters of those sources (e.g., centroid and shape parameters), and perform aperture and PSF photometry. Written in Python, it is an affiliated package of Astropy (ascl:1304.002).

SNCosmo synthesizes supernova spectra and photometry from SN models, and has functions for fitting and sampling SN model parameters given photometric light curve data. It offers fast implementations of several commonly used extinction laws and can be used to construct SN models that include dust. The SNCosmo library includes supernova models such as SALT2, MLCS2k2, Hsiao, Nugent, PSNID, SNANA and Whalen models, as well as a variety of built-in bandpasses and magnitude systems, and provides convenience functions for reading and writing peculiar data formats used in other packages. The library is extensible, allowing new models, bandpasses, and magnitude systems to be defined using an object-oriented interface.

Astroquery allows users to access online astronomical data from a wide range of sources; it is an Astropy-affiliated package. Each web service has its own sub-package for interfacing with a particular data source.

dynesty is a Dynamic Nested Sampling package for estimating Bayesian posteriors and evidences. dynesty samples from a given distribution when provided with a loglikelihood function, a prior_transform function (that transforms samples from the unit cube to the target prior), and the dimensionality of the parameter space.

SEP (Source Extraction and Photometry) makes the core algorithms of Source Extractor (ascl:1010.064) available as a library of standalone functions and classes. These operate directly on in-memory arrays (no FITS files or configuration files). The code is derived from the Source Extractor code base (written in C) and aims to produce results compatible with Source Extractor whenever possible. SEP consists of a C library with no dependencies outside the standard library and a Python module that wraps the C library in a Pythonic API. The Python wrapper operates on NumPy arrays with NumPy as its only dependency. It is generated using Cython.

From Source Extractor, SEP includes background estimation, image segmentation (including on-the-fly filtering and source deblending), aperture photometry in circular and elliptical apertures, and source measurements such as Kron radius, "windowed" position fitting, and half-light radius. It also adds the following features that are not available in Source Extractor: optimized matched filter for variable noise in source extraction; circular annulus and elliptical annulus aperture photometry functions; local background subtraction in shape consistent with aperture in aperture photometry functions; exact pixel overlap mode in all aperture photometry functions; and masking of elliptical regions on images.

extinction is an implementation of fast interstellar dust extinction laws in Python. It contains Cython-optimized implementations of empirical dust extinction laws found in the literature. Flux values can be reddened or dereddened using included functions, and all extinction laws accept a unit keyword to change the interpretation of the wavelength array from Angstroms to inverse microns. Part of this code originated in the specutils package (ascl:1902.012).

nestle is a pure Python implementation of nested sampling algorithms for evaluating Bayesian evidence. Nested sampling integrates posterior probability in order to compare models in Bayesian statistics. It is similar to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in that it generates samples that can be used to estimate the posterior probability distribution. Unlike MCMC, the nature of the sampling also allows one to calculate the integral of the distribution. It is also a pretty good method for robustly finding global maxima.